Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Christopher Grant: My first question is, when you sit down to create, do
you have more than just a blank screen or page in front of you? Is it different
with short stories than with a novel?

Richard Godwin: When I sit down to write a story I do not
plan, sometimes it can start with a voice, a character talking, or an image, a
variety of forms that seem to be demanding growth. Sometimes a story takes shape
immediately and others need pruning. I write from all sorts of places. I also
write every day unless it is impossible to do so. It is about practice and I like what Pablo Picasso said when
he was asked why he worked so hard, he said because 'I want to be at work when
inspiration strikes'. A novel is different. Apart from two novels I have
written, I plan and edit. The edit is a critical part of the process and I make
copious notes.

CG: What was the process for Apostle Rising like? How long did you
spend researching? And how much of what you wanted to write wound up in the
novel versus how much wound up on the cutting room floor?

RG: Writing Apostle Rising was non-linear with a linear plan. The truth is if you plan you need at some stage to
let go of it. I researched certain parts heavily, certain parts I already knew.
I wanted the characters to live and breathe. I wrote the first draft flat out in
six weeks and then engaged in a heavy editing process. That involved layers of
discovery. It is like an archaeological dig in which you find out truths about
your own characters. A lot of passages I liked ended up on the cutting room
floor. I think John D. MacDonald said sometimes you have to kill your darlings.
If the passage has no relevance to the plot get rid of it. I can see now there
is scope for more ruthlessness within that. The edit is revealing. It is a key
part of the process.

CG: Do you prefer writing or re-writing? Do you consider yourself a better
writer or re-writer? Or does it vary from story to story or story to
novel?

RG: I love writing and all parts
of that. Writing a story is quicker and in some ways more immediately satisfying
than a novel, which requires careful editing. That can be a laborious process.
When the breakthroughs come they are more satisfying with a novel.

CG: Let's talk about Apostle Rising now. I have said that I think it reads
like a true mystery. By which I mean that in stories that are lumped as mystery
stories or novels, you usually get the crime happening and the writer tries to
set the stage for your eventual discovery of who the criminal is but, for some
reason, they can't help themselves and, by the third chapter, either the writer
has revealed who the criminal is or the reader has been given enough clues to
make that discovery for themselves. Whereas, with Apostle Rising, it seems that
you played your cards very close to the vest.

Did you deliberately set out to do so or did the novel just start to come
together like that as you were writing it?

RG: I set out to keep the killer's
identity hidden. I wanted the reader to experience the mystery a cop finds
himself in when he is tracking an extreme psychopath, as well as the effect of
dealing with evil. Within that process the novel assumed an organic life of its
own. I kept the revelation about who is doing the killings back and the
discovery is a surprise. No one has said they guessed who the killer was. That
involves careful structuring, peppering the story with clues and involving the
sub plot, in which there is also a guessing game about the killer's identity.
Apostle Rising is as much about psychopaths who want to destroy and leave scars
as it is about the resilience necessary for a cop to survive the investigative
process that catching a psychopath involves, and as you know, the story is far
from over.

CG: Without ruining the ending for those that haven't yet picked up Apostle
Rising (and those who have already know the ending so the question will not be
lost on them), is there a sequel to Apostle Rising in the offing?

RG: Yes there is a sequel. I am
writing it now. My second novel, Mr. Glamour, was released in paperback by Black
Jackal Books in April of this year, and the sequel to Apostle Rising will be
released next year. It has just sold foreign rights to the largest publisher in
Hungary, Alexandra, and there are other offers tabled. Suffice to say the sequel
will explore the key characters in more detail and contain some
fireworks.

CG: The violence in Apostle Rising and in many of your stories is over the
top and very surreal. I believe that it's justified in all cases, but especially
in a novel like Apostle Rising where the story is that of the police, and in
particular two partners, dealing with extreme psychopaths, as you put it. The
violence in Apostle Rising must be what homicide detectives in particular,
worldwide, deal with on a daily basis and not the sanitized for your protection crap that they show us on police
procedurals such as Law And Order and the
like.

That said, have you ever had complaints about the level of violence that
are contained in your stories or in Apostle Rising?

RG: No I have never had any
complaints about it. If you really want some hard core violence try the Bible.
The truth is I have read of worse things in the papers. People are encouraged to
avoid the stark reality of the predatory universe we live in, F Scott Fitzgerald
referred to it as crooning there are no wolves outside the cabin door. It is
also a beautiful universe. If you study what serial killers do or what the Nazis
did to their victims it makes Apostle Rising look like a vicar's tea party. Men
and women were held in concentration camps where women were systematically raped
and healthy men were castrated in the name of medical science. You see a nation
in psychosis. I am writing about one or
two individuals in psychosis. The surreal aspect may be to do with the fact that
if you slow the camera down to ensure all aspects are visible the reader's brain
goes into a self defence mechanism. If we ignore the lessons of history, if we
conveniently brush away the less savoury aspects of human experience then we are
doomed to repeat them. Crime cannot be sanitised and wrapped up at the check out
in a department store. I have tried to be realistic about the fact that
sometimes there is no moral redemption for those who have crossed the line and
those who, badge bearing law enforcers they may be, have followed. We live in a
culture full of myths. I am interested in opening them up and seeing what
purpose they serve.

CG: What do purpose do you think these myths serve?

One of the myths in America (at least) is that pornography and sex should
be swept under the carpet, that it's worse than violence. People with brain
cells believe that wholesale slaughter, such as the massacre of people in Iraq
or Afghanistan, is more pornographic than two people with their genitalia
showing or touching someone else's
genitalia, but these people are generally few and far between.

Why do you think it is that violence is more acceptable than sex? Do you
think Hollywood has something to do with that?

RG: If you look at the
mythologies of Ancient Greece as described in Ovid, they serve many purposes.
They explain the world the Greeks inhabited and also their religious system.
Some of the myths are interpretations of nature. Sex features heavily in them
also, they use symbolic language to create meaning. Modern mythologies have
become less complex and more part of a propaganda machine. I think Hollywood is
responsible for the sex phobia that is appeased by images of violence. The
Hollywood machine wants to sanitise sex and relationships to the point where it
is actually peddle lies. There is no realism in Hollywood and if you look at the
sexual habits of the key players you have to wonder. People fuck. They always
have and always will. It is part of the human condition, and a valid subject. I
think the fact that so many Hollywood films stick to a formula may be one reason
the industry fears sex. It doesn't want to make a porn flick, which is probably
all it would come up with. But erotic films never come from Hollywood. People
are fed violence every day. That appeals to a certain machismo and head set
about defence when defence may not be necessary. Lenny Bruce once said it is
interesting that they describe sexual content as obscene and it is not obscene
to show someone's guts hanging out.
Perhaps because Hollywood caters to fantasies it is nervous to cater to sexual
fantasies, it might be tantamount to admitting it is a massive whore. At the end
of the day it seems mythology has come to mean lies. Lies about sex, lies about
the economy, about the need for violence, about the lifestyles people enjoy and
others aspire to. It is also connected to the rise of the theocratic right.
Young men and women are meant to go to church and think pure thoughts, as Zappa
paraphrased their saccharine values in Joe's Garage. The reason for this has to
lie in the fact that if you shackle them into marriage and let them breed it's
good for business, more punters for church. I think Hollywood is brainwashed. It
is also in the pay of the plastic surgery industry, itself another mythologiser. Never age, never wrinkle. Some
doctor somewhere has a drawer full of noses and they all look the same. Many of
the shrieking crusaders bearing placards denouncing sexual acts are themselves
so diseased their prurience is all they have to hold onto. They are frightened
of their own desires which is why the seek out the thing that offends them.
Politics is also a source of mythology. The need for war is surrounded by
propaganda and myth. If you ask what a myth is doing in the modern world it will
usually serve the economy or a belief system that is intent on denying some
value that the ruling class finds threatening. The ruling class may be Hollywood
or the pharmaceutical industry.

CG: How much of what we see in the news is actual news and how much of what
is actual news is kept from us?

RG: I think most of all the real
news is kept from us. There is a line in a William Burroughs novel in which a
journalist says we make the news quite literally. I think it is fiction. Badly
written fiction aimed at as Zappa said keeping you docile and ignorant. Propped
up by the companies that commit serial rape on a daily basis. While they pursue
all the bad guys. You know the most wanted ones. They bury the news beneath a
massive plot. A newspaper is a narrative structure. If you study the
juxtapositions of stories you are aware you have been placed in a plot
structure that is supporting the men who own the newspapers. Now some serious
facts. Let's talk about Halliburton and
Bechtel. Who pays them? The US taxpayer. The same taxpayers fund the
military-corporate system of weapons manufacturers. Bomb and rebuild, same old
army game as William Burroughs says in From Here To Eternity. Now for the
Marshall Pan, the act of benevolence. Whose benevolence? Of the $13 billion of
the Marshall Plan, as cited by Noam Chomsky in Imperial Ambitions, about $2
billion went to the US oil companies. If you look at the rest of the aid, it
moved from one pocket to another. Go do the maths. The Financial Times is the
best newspaper in the world because it contains detailed economic analysis that
businessmen need. If you read between the lines you can figure a lot out. The
truth is we depend on newspapers that are in the pay of their shareholders. The
truth is in their pockets.

CG: I've been on your end of your question about parallel universes. So
here's me returning the favor.

What are your thoughts on both parallel universes and doppelgangers? Have
you had any experiences with doppelgangers?

RG: I believe there are multiple
universes and we inhabit one. I think the powers that wish to capitalise out of
us want to convince us of the universe. Henry Adams spoke of the multiverse. It is also a discontinuous one.
Fragmented by the belief structures that aim for monopolisation.

The worm hole theory is a possible. Also the implosion of a supernova as
one example of an event horizon being created. I have no experiences of
doppelgangers. Although you have to ask yourself are you the ideal or the failed
version. Poe wrote William Wilson. Edward Thomas wrote The Other in which a
failed man pursues his alter ego through a rural landscape to be met with
disappointment. Parallels are not about narcissism. Remember Echo imitated
Narcissus.

CG: Taking off on that, do you think that the doppelganger is a
manifestation of the ideal self or the manifestation of evil? And if the former
or the latter, what does that say about ourselves?

RG: It depends which position you
occupy.You have to remember most of the morality we are taught is riddled with
guilt and religion. Now take Catholicism. We had a Pope banning the use of
condoms in Africa when they may have halted the spread of AIDS. He was a good
man. Or was he evil? What he did is certainly open to moral questioning. In
whose eyes? In certain communities burying your parents in boxes is considered
evil. Who's right? It's about moral relativism. Nietzsche said there are no
moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena. Hamlet said there is
no right or wrong but thinking makes it so. Now you have to draw the line
somewhere. Most of us know where that is. An enlightened society would protect
the vulnerable, the young and old, without propagandising and protecting the
abusers of power while using the newspapers to point the finger at irrelevant
statistics that amount to nothing. It all depends on the mirror. Maybe your
double is yourself or your devil. What does that mean to you? Many people spend
every other second hiding something, some sick little secret. William Blake
frequently conversed with the devil. But you have to know what he meant by that.
Gide wrote The Immoralist. Are your
morals holding you back? Does the glue on the world seem to be holding fast?
Maybe the devil is your shadow, all those things you brush under the carpet. See
what you find out.

CG: We've talked about perception and about myths in society.

What, in your opinion, is the greatest lie of our time?

RG: That all parents love their children.

Many hate them because they fail, and that is a
by product of the conditioning we were talking about earlier.

CG: Since we were talking about the pope just a moment ago, first, I
suppose I should ask, are you religious? And, whether you are or not, what are
your thoughts about organized religion?

Just for the record, I'm not religious in the least. I think there is a big
difference between being spiritual and being religious. When I'm asked about
whether I believe there's a god or not, I say, "I don't care one way or another.
I'm not living my life so that I can get into a concept like heaven or hell. I
don't treat someone differently just so I can get through the gates." And you'll
notice that I don't capitalize the word
god.

RG: No I am not religious. I have
thought and read a lot about religion and while I believe there are spiritual
truths within the texts of religions I believe institutionalising spirituality
corrupts it. Then you have the organisers of the religion. History is packed
with examples of the corruption of the ideals represented by religion. Let's
turn our attention to war. So many fought on the back of religion. So it seems a
good tool of propaganda. It often appeals to the uneducated and exploits them. I
think it is an extension of politics. I also think if you get enough followers
and enough money as L. Ron Hubbard did you can start a new religion.

CG: Burroughs wrote many, many times that we must evolve as a species and
travel into space.

Do you think we will ever, as a species, evolve to this point?

Do you think that we have been deliberately kept from evolving to that
point which we would be able to travel into space by the powers that be?

Have they kept us on this planet to milk every last resource off of it and
only then, when that time comes, will they abandon the planet?

Or do you think that it is a fear of the unknown that has kept us grounded?
The unknown represented by outer space itself.

There was a time on this planet (and it ended about the time the west was
finally stolen from the Native Americans) when you would grow up to about the
age of fifteen or sixteen and you would get yourself a mode of transportation
(usually a horse) and you would set off over that hill and see what was beyond
that hill.

When we, as a species, started into space, we set a goal of getting there,
then going to the moon and then there was a goal of going to Mars (and I can
still remember the Time Magazine cover talking about how, by 1986, we would have
a colony on Mars; still waiting).

We don't have goals like that anymore, unless they come out of a windbag
like Newt Gingrich, who would have a colony on the moon but it would be a US
colony (no Russkies and darkies allowed,
I'm sure the sign would say) and that when there were 13,000 people on the moon,
they could become a state. Don't ask me how he arrived at 13,000.

And, even if you want that colony on the moon, you don't want this dickhead
running anything, especially not supposedly running the United States.

RG: Many of Burroughs's
observations about space travel are based on mutation theory. We have mutated as
a species if you consider Darwin's theory of evolution which is an adaptive one.
If we travelled to space it would present a different environment and therefore
mutation would be involved. He posited various scenarios. One likely one would
be politicians colonising outer space while the rest of us were left below.
Burroughs thought the future of mankind may depend on outer space since we are
messing up this planet.

If it is already happening it would be hidden from us. Programmes like
the X Files put forward various theories to that effect. The military may have
invented forms of space travel. However evolution doesn't always look pretty.
Brion Gysin, who Burroughs credited with
the cut-up technique, saw artists as explorers of space. Burroughs said writers
are cosmonauts of inner space.

You may ally physics with Art. Take the latest theories from physics
about event horizons and worm holes and see how these ideas are already present
in Art in all its forms.

The two biggest economic forces on the planet are war and
pharmaceuticals. So it may be likely that war and medicating the population is
preventing them from understanding what is going on with space travel. A
revolution may be a non violent one. If everyone threw all their medication away
consider the outcome. Einstein talked about the space time continuum. Kurosawa
said if all clocks were stopped worldwide there would be havoc. Space is in
time, and outer space is in time. A medicated population digests what it is
given and doesn't know what time it is. You have to consider to whose advantage
that is. People treat newspapers as factual yet they are a narrative and contain
fictions. Or maybe the earth is being replaced as a big theme park with one
benevolent president and endless shopping malls. The West talks a lot about
propaganda in other nations. Yet at the same time the propaganda machine of the
West is subtle and more evolved and works through the channels on which its
population has become dependent. The medical industry has an investment in
people being ill, despite its claims to the opposite. The consumer society is
based on acquisition and status as bases of identity but in fact they do not
give identity, and the consumers are being consumed by a series of financial
commands that ensure they are trapped in debt and imaginary need for things
which they are told will improve their lives.

CG: In the grand scheme of things, was Orwell more correct or was
Huxley?

In Orwell's 1984, the state is totalitarian and there are punishments for
those that do not conform. The general populace is basically cut off from
reality.

When I read 1984 for the first time, I thought of the populace being
underground and, when they were above the earth, behind walls, much like a
concentration camp.

Whereas, when I first read Huxley's Brave New World, I never got that
sense. I always got the sense that here are people living lives that are not
their own. They are us. They are medicated off their asses and just pop another
pill to feel good and everyone has become homogenized.

This is what frustrates the fuck out of me when people, especially
so-called liberals, talk about how we should all be one race and no one should
have different cultural identities.

Are we all one human race? Yes. Should we treat each other as such? Yes.
But should we give up our cultural identities? Should I stop being proud of my
German and Russian and Irish and English and Italian and Polish ancestry? Should
Barack Obama, for example, stop being proud of the fact that his father was from
Kenya? I don't think so but you'll notice that the media and the right-wing have
attempted to make him ashamed of this, going so far as to suggest that the
president was not born in Hawaii but in Kenya.

RG: I think it is a mix of both
visions and I use the word visionary. I believe we inhabit a pharmaceutical
totalitarian state in the West. People are medicated off their asses and do not
know who they are. They are cut off from the Naked Lunch as Burroughs put it, by
which he meant that naked moment when you see exactly what is on the end of your
fork. The homogenisation of man starts at school and continues through the one
dimensional careers pursued by some in corporations which want to clone their
workers. This may take the form of family roles. The word family derives from
the Latin word familia meaning family,
servants and domestics. Society is structured on that unit as a way of
engineering human response to a set of stimuli which are political agendas aimed
to benefit the interests of the ruling party. Being cut off from reality may
take the form of extreme totalitarian propaganda or the medicated man we see now
as the product of a society with certain economically based views about
health.

CG: Do you think it's possible for dreams to predict future events?

RG: I think it is more than
likely that dreams predict future events, since they scramble time lines.
Grammar is a language and dreams communicate through an alternative means, they
are more allied to a hieroglyphic sign system. If you consider the signifier and
signified and you randomise the sequence then you have it. The subconscious
rearranges events to suit our particular mode of reference and we need to
interpret that, to understand it you have to go beyond causality.

CG: Tell us about your new novel, Mr, Glamour.

RG: Mr. Glamour is Hannibal Lecter in Gucci. Something dark is preying on
the glitz of the glamour set. DCI Jackson
Flare and Inspector Mandy Steele investigate a series of bizarre killings
targeting the wealthy and glamorous. Cameras, designer labels, beautiful women
and wealthy men fill the pages. The killer in Mr. Glamour knows all about
design, he knows what brands mean to his victims. He is branding their skins. He
is invading and destroying at will. And he has the police stumped.

Detective Inspector Flare and Inspector Steele try to catch a killer who
has climbed inside their heads. As they investigate they step into a hall of
mirrors and find themselves up against a wall of secrecy. The investigation
drives Flare and Steele—who are themselves harbouring secrets—to acts of
darkness. And the killer is watching everyone. In it I explore some of the areas
we have been talking about, particularly narcissism and designer labels.
Paul Brazill's called it a great London novel. It's receiving excellent reviews
and is available here, among other
places.

Christopher Grant: Minus the use of human material, of course, how did the love of good food
or cooking play a role in the genesis of The Mustard Man stories (if any)?

Richard Godwin: The host gives the meal. The parasite digests, he sits at the shoulder of
the diners and watches their habits.

The Mustard Man is a mythology. He is a
modern mythology of desire and need. As such the monopolies of homogenised food
are part of the thematic materials that comprise the narratives. He is part and
parcel of what we eat. He is also a character who will feed to you the thing you
ought to eat and as such he goes beyond waiters and the catering industry which
are a reflection of our own commercial narcissism and economic need.

CG: As I read Piquant, and I mentioned this to you, I began to see The Mustard
Man as a hero. He doesn't target the everyman but rather those that hold
themselves above the common person and the laws that the rest of us have to
follow. Do you consider The Mustard Man a hero, an anti-hero, a force of nature,
something else?

RG: The Mustard Man is all of these, he occupies the precise position in modern
history where all terms lose their meaning and he injects them with renewed
vigour. Heroism is a product of the political system it serves, and an anti hero
is now subject to surveillance, those subverters of the order of things may be
subject to the system they rebel against but a force of nature is that precisely
because of his knowledge of his own destiny. The key here is the people the
Mustard Man eviscerates with great gastronomy and there we have the food chain.
Darwin posited an evolutionary model we inhabit as a paradigm that may be
juxtaposed to those theories about what we need to survive propagated by the
political systems we inhabit, the Mustard Man has been in all of these and is
beyond them too, because his identity is part of an ongoing historical
revolution that has always been here and always will be. He is the Saviour of
Art and the Champion of Art. He is placing certain people back into the food
chain.

CG: In Kentucky Ketchup, it is said that Jack Laretto has a new novel out
called Pony Trip. You, of course, had a story about a deranged serial killing
spirit by the same name. To intentionally get meta on you, is Pony Trip the
novel Pony Trip the story leaking into the fictional stream now that The Mustard
Man has re-seeded the space/time continuum?

RG: The Mustard Man works with herbs. He understands the nature of soil. The
farm lay untenanted for months that passed with the slow resolution of some grim
prophecy. Winter turned and settled a million leaves deep in the soil that
acquired new fecundity from the mulch and insects that bred there.

CG: What is Julius Pharaoh in the whole thing? Is he is follower/recruiter or
is just biding his time to usurp The Mustard Man's leadership? Or would that be
telling?

RG: Julius Pharaoh is a product of the changes the Mustard Man makes in the
space/time continuum. He is the prophet of a parallel position in time to the
characters he meets.

CG: William S. Burroughs talked about good versus evil in terms of Johnsons and
Shits. In the collection, The Mustard Man doesn't target your common man (or
woman) and even goes out of his way to help one of these people. Instead, he
targets those that Burroughs would have called Shits (the politicians, the
reviewers of art that don't know what art is, et al). How much influence did
Burroughs have on these stories (if any) and how much of it was your own
distaste for the Shits amongst us?

RG: I like Burroughs's depiction of the Johnsons. There are certain people who
like to stick their noses in but do nothing when needed. That is not the
Johnsons. If Burroughs was an influence here he was not a conscious one. However
the Mustard Man is a champion. Those who wish to impose a facile moral order
based on their own prejudices are undoubtedly going to end up in the food
mixture. If one has a palate it is impossible not for feel distaste for the
Shits among us. The Shits who make moral judgements without due consideration.

Over the course of the last five months or so, I have conducted two interviews with Richard Godwin, author of thirty-six stories here at ATON and many more elsewhere, as well as two novels Apostle Rising and Mr. Glamour and a collection of short stories about everyone's favorite mover and shaker, The Mustard Man.